


a slow dance to infinite

by shatterthelight



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F, Season Three Timeskip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 10:57:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12364218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shatterthelight/pseuds/shatterthelight
Summary: But the nights go on, and the mornings come, and neither one of them runs.Time passes. It gets easier.They learn how to love out loud.





	a slow dance to infinite

**Author's Note:**

> In which the 4x01 flashback made me Feel Things.

After a while, the days they spend together dancing barefoot on the shore feel a lot like being happy. 

Not right away. There are nights, in the beginning, when the residual fear brings Luisa to her knees, fear she has carried for years after all those mornings that Rose disappeared alongside the stars and Luisa woke to an empty bed. She never confesses this, but Rose must notice the anxiety sparking along her skin, because her touch grows a little more careful every day, as though she’s wary one wrong move will scare Luisa off.

But the nights go on, and the mornings come, and neither one of them runs.

Time passes. It gets easier.

They learn how to love out loud.

Luisa has had to keep her heart under lock and key for so long that the newfound freedom is a shock to her system. At times, it leaves her paralyzed in disbelief, has her on edge for the moment she'll wake up from this dream.

There is something to be said, however, about kissing in the wide open daylight under the endless blue of heaven, living and loving without a single care of how many angels might see.

She still thinks about her father, more often than she’d like to. She’s not disillusioned about the man he was, the love that he felt for her, even if he didn’t know how to show it. But _loving_ is not the same as _seeing_ , and he never did see her, never did understand that Luisa was always a thunderstorm as much as she was his little bird. She cannot sand away her scars any more than she can force herself to smile, and so she can’t – won’t – feel guilty, not when Rose is the only person who has ever loved every single wretched and wonderful part of her without condition or complaint, the only person to love every shade of her weather.

And if her father is turning in his grave, then so be it, because Luisa has never known any place safer than the arms of his killer.

 

* * *

 

They lie side by side with eyes wide open as often as they sleep. Luisa has never been able to drift off easily. Rose can drop away in seconds, but when Luisa can’t sleep, she doesn't either.

“You don’t have to stay awake with me,” Luisa says one night while she’s curled against Rose, head nuzzled at her chest. “I’m alright.”

“I know,” Rose murmurs, stroking her hair. “But you've been alone for too long already.”

There’s less sex. There is a _lot_ of sex, but there is so much more of everything else, all the things they’ve never been able to share before. There are midnight conversations and prolonged embraces and fingers intertwined. There are heads resting on shoulders. There are kisses without haste. Their love no longer has to be a desperate battle, so they let it ease into a quiet passion, far less violent but no less vivid, and it is somewhere along these lines that the aforementioned happiness takes root.

Rose leans back on her hands and bumps her knee against Luisa’s as they watch the sunset. “What are you thinking about?”

She almost doesn’t register the question from the cloud of her reverie. “Hm?”

“You’re smiling.”

“Am I?” She’d been floating, yes, but nowhere in particular. “I didn’t realize.”

Rose’s gaze on her lingers, and her eyes, shocked and scared and soft with adoration, speak louder than words ever could. Luisa lets loose a shaky breath and shuffles closer, and she imagines this moment as a painting: two lovers, smiling without the need for reason, set against a tranquil sea and a thousand colors overhead.

 

* * *

 

They both have nightmares, happiness notwithstanding. They don't happen every night, but it's often enough that they fall into routines for their respective circumstances. Luisa is open about her dreams, even when Rose features as the villain. More than once she remembers the mental hospital, remembers all those rough hands gripping her arms and dragging her away, remembers feeling terrified and betrayed and  _powerless_. More than once she dreams of her father, air crushed out of his lungs as Rose buries him under the concrete. 

She wakes up shaking, crying, gasping for air, and Rose is right there, arms enveloping her as panic ricochets against the walls of her soul. Sometimes Luisa clings to her; other times she tears away on impulse. When she does the latter, the expression that crosses Rose’s face bears a great deal of resemblance to self-loathing.

“I’m sorry,” Rose says, voice strained. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” it pours out of her in a flood, “I am so, so sorry.” A single tear slips out of the corner of her eye, slides down her cheek, drops onto the sheets. “For all of it.”

“You are more than the things you've done,” Luisa whispers back. “You are more than the ways you've hurt me.”

“But I still hurt you." They are so close that it’s a wonder there is any empty space left between them to fill, but Rose finds a way, pulling her in until their foreheads press together. “I can never take that back."

Rose’s nightmares are silent hauntings. She doesn’t toss or turn or wake up in screaming. She just slips out of bed, unable to fall back asleep no matter the hour. Luisa hears her stalk out of the room, and she gives it about five minutes before she follows.

“Hey,” Luisa says softly when she finds Rose sitting on the balcony, staring blankly out into the darkness of space. “You okay?”

Rose nods, a lie of a gesture. She is still a clandestine heart, but Luisa has learned throughout the years how to coax out the reality, so she settles into the chair beside her. “You don’t have to tell me what it was about. Just tell me how you feel.”

Rose takes a shuddering breath and shuts her dry eyes. She cries, sometimes, when Luisa has nightmares. She never cries when she has them herself. “Lost.”

Luisa turns the word over in her mind, studies its jagged edges and the phantoms living in the cracks. “You know,” she says, “I’ve spent a lot of time searching for the girl inside of you.”

Her laugh is brief and humorless. “I’m not sure there’s anything to find.”

It’s such a sad statement that a shard of it cuts across Luisa’s chest. She reaches for Rose’s hand and lifts it, slowly, to rest right over Rose’s heart. “There’s this.” It beats beneath both of their palms. “I found this a long time ago.”

Rose, biting her lip and saying nothing, turns her face back towards the night. And maybe she’ll always see herself as unsettled dust, but Luisa looks at her now, cast in the moonlight, and sees a supernova.

 

* * *

 

Rose takes up watercolor. It does not go well. 

“Might I _remind_ you, the trashcan isn’t just for decoration," Luisa says while picking up yet _another_  piece of torn up paper off the floor. Rose, making what may or may not be a noise of acknowledgement, doesn’t look up, but her forehead is visibly creased in frustration. “Are you actually glaring at the paint right now?”

“It’s pissing me off.” She strokes her brush across the rough paper even as she says it.

“It’s been pissing you off all week.” Luisa peeks over her shoulder and honestly, the picture isn’t even bad, Rose is just the living embodiment of melodrama.

“Because it won’t just _do_ what I _want_ it to.” As if on cue, green and purple run across the page and bleed together, and Rose makes to rip the paper in half.

Luisa slips it away from her before she can. “So why keep at it?”

“I refuse to be bested by a tray of _watery pigment_.”

“Then here,” Luisa sets the paper aside and retrieves Rose’s sketchbook, “take a break. Do something you’re good at.”

“I’m good at everything,” Rose mumbles, but she shoots another glare at the paint before flipping open the book.

After marrying Emilio, art had become one of the things Rose had not allowed herself when she was trying to be more character than person, and it had taken her years to draw again. She credits this to Luisa, who she once referred to as, quote for quote, “the most obnoxiously beautiful muse to ever live,” and it’s true enough that the pages of her sketchbook are filled with drawings of her. Some of them are portraits, but most of them are like candid photographs: Luisa dozing away on the couch, Luisa curled up with a book, Luisa pirouetting along the shore while her hair whips around in the salt-tanged breeze.

Luisa, for her part, is happy to be an obnoxiously beautiful muse. Rose is so preciously in her element when she draws, laser-focused and paying meticulous attention to every tiny detail (frankly, Luisa could have told her that watercolors, intuitive and unforgiving, wouldn’t end well for her), and Luisa cherishes the normalcy of it all.

“Which one is your favorite?” Luisa asks as Rose flicks through the sketches.

When she comes across a blank sheet, she says, “This one.”  
  
Luisa quirks an eyebrow. “That would be nothing.”

“Which means it could still be anything.”

“Ah. Schrodinger’s drawing.”

“Don’t.”

She settles onto Rose’s lap and drops her head into the crook of her neck. “Then make it something.”

So Rose picks up a pencil, and Luisa marvels as she breathes life into an empty page.

 

* * *

 

They aren’t without their fights. They’re both insufferable in their own individual ways, and now they’re spending nearly all their waking hours together, so the bickering is inevitable and rarely anything more than a snarky exchange that’s already forgotten about an hour later.

Neither of them are the type to half-ass the things that matter, though, so the real and honest _arguments_ , infrequent they might be, are raw and angry and shredded from the knives of words spoken and unspoken alike. They do have rules, few but firm, nonverbally established and mutually understood: Luisa is not crazy, Rose is not heartless, and they never say the word _regret_.

They follow these rules, unwaveringly, but their refrainment from the lowest blows doesn’t mean that the hits that do land don’t sting, and after a few months, they go ahead and add a fourth rule: _sex is not, in and of itself, a resolution_.

It’s dark outside, but Luisa can make out Rose sitting at the edge of the water, and she plops down at her side and kicks her legs out into the wet sand. “Can we talk now, or do you still want to throttle me?”

“I never want to throttle you.” Rose wrings her hands and sighs. “Maybe just… gently strangle.”

“Sometimes I want to light you on fire,” Luisa offers. “So that’s fair.

They are both quiet for a long time before Rose finally says, “I don’t understand why you love me.”

“Stop.” Luisa cups her chin and forces Rose to look at her. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“But I don’t.” Her face is stone, hardened over in a manner far too much like those early, tumultuous years. In the past, her walls were a means to keep Luisa out; nowadays, they seem to serve to hold herself in. “You are worth so much more than I will ever be able to give you.”

“I could do with you not slamming the front door every time you storm off.” Luisa crawls around behind Rose, wraps her arms around her and leans against her back. “But there's more to you than you give yourself credit for.”

Rose snorts. “Sure.”

“ _Rose_ ,” and Rose goes stiff, “listen to me. You are the only person – the _only_ person – who has ever stared down my demons and _stayed_. Do you get that? You’re the only one.” Rose trembles in her arms, and Luisa hugs her closer. “And that is worth a life on the run. You are dramatic and entitled and a pain in the _ass,_ and I will follow you to the ends of the earth.” She pauses. “But I still might set you on fire.”

That earns a treasured laugh, and Rose pulls out of Luisa’s embrace so she can turn to face her. “You sure do seem to want me hot.”

They join hands and stand (together, they do so many things together now, the mundane and the meaningful and everything in between) and Luisa, eyes glittering with mischief, pulls her dress over her head. Rose doesn’t question it. They strip down to bare skin and stumble into the water, shivering and giggling, tangling their hands in each other’s wet hair and kissing the salt off their lips.

In a breath between kisses, Rose caresses Luisa’s cheek. “ _You_ are the only person who has ever seen the human in me,” she whispers. “You’re the only person who ever looked for it.”

 

* * *

 

“Do you miss your brother?”

Startled, Luisa glances up from her book. “No.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. “Yes.”

Rose, sprawled out on the floor, narrows her eyes. “I’m getting mixed messages.”

Luisa shifts uncomfortably, wondering if this is a test. But she and Rose are past lying to each other, and they have fought too long and too hard for that unquestionable honesty for Luisa to be anything but truthful right now. “I do miss him. But I lost him a long time ago.” Her vision blurs, and she lays her book down. “You know... we really were close once. When we were young and our dad was such a non-presence, it was just us, and that was all we had.”

“Yeah. You’ve talked about that before,” Rose says, hushed and solemn and without accusation.

She talks about it a lot, actually, or at least she used to. She’d mattered to him and he’d mattered to her and that, more than anything else, is what she misses. They still love each other; Luisa’s heart is not made for anything less than complete emotional devotion, and the fact that Rafael is capable of getting so angry at her means he still cares. But these past few years, Luisa has sent him countless cries for help, and each and every time, he turned away.

“We needed each other.” Her voice cracks. She ignores it. “And now we don’t.”

“Luisa–”

“We don’t,” she repeats, swiping a hand under her eyes. “Maybe we’ll fix it one day. Maybe we won’t. But either way, he doesn’t need me. He has Jane and Mateo and he doesn’t need me. But I don't need him either."

As she speaks, Rose crosses the room and curls up beside her on the couch, and she takes the blanket draped over Luisa’s legs and spreads it across the both of them.

“He isn’t alone anymore.” Luisa snuggles up against her. “And neither am I.”

She’ll never stop wondering what she could have done, how she could have saved it, what is so fundamentally wrong with her that she lost who was once most important person in her life over it. But she’s tired of apologizing for all her imperfections. If he’s found a new family for himself, then that’s enough for her. She will always, always love her little brother, but some wars are not worth the wounds.

And Luisa has found a love that isn’t shaped like an hourglass.

 

* * *

 

Rose remains a high-maintenance, persnickety princess; they have sex on the beach exactly once before she refuses to do it ever again because _sand, Luisa, there is sand_ everywhere, _there is sand in places that sand should never be._  

So they keep the sex in the bedroom and reserve the ocean for softer things. Long evening walks. Thoughtful talks by the bonfire. Holding hands and kissing just to kiss and slow dancing to the symphony of the breaking waves.

They dance now, bare feet tiptoeing along the shoreline, fingers interlacing, Rose spinning her around and looking at her as though she’s made of constellations. They are the universe in slow motion, two broken and still-beating hearts pressed together, untamed souls in tandem.

“Loving you was my salvation,” Rose says.

“Pretentious drama queen,” Luisa says.

“Yours.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Sarcastic idiot.”

Their foreheads touch. “Yours.” 

 

* * *

 

Luisa used to believe there wasn’t a place on this earth for the two of them.

As it turns out? She was right. There wasn’t a place for a lonely girl who feels her every emotion with too much ferocity, who holds her arms out to catch the light that the sun refuses to give her. There wasn’t a place for a woman who had whittled herself down to empty, who lived so many lives and played so many roles that she is only now starting to find herself again.

And there wasn’t a place for this love of theirs, this messy, messy love that tore them both apart, woke them up, left them bleeding, reminded them of all the differences between existing and living.

So they carved one. This corner of the sky they share – they carved it out of their blood and their bones and their twisted history, and they found a home in each other.

It is built on rocky foundation, both of them still so uncertain of what the other could have fallen for, both of them loving each other more than they could ever love themselves. The walls are unsteady and rattle with the wind, and the roof leaks with all the tears they shed. The garden overflows with wildly growing flowers that crawl up the columns and arc over the doorway. The floorboards creak, but they never fall through.

It sways. It shakes. It stays standing.

It isn’t perfect. It never could be. But it is theirs, ghosts and all, and it’s the most beautiful home Luisa has ever known. And while no one else may ever understand it, Luisa finds that she cares less and less with each passing day. This is her story. She is done letting the rest of the world write it for her.

Let the angels judge.


End file.
